A Sound That Just Won't Quit Jesse And Evelyn Stone Helped Make Music What It Is Today

June 15, 1985|By Elizabeth Maupin of The Sentinel Staff

WINTER SPRINGS — Two big orange cats lie sleeping in the heat of this neat-as-a-pin suburban garage. A blond spinet piano sits against one wall, the customary washer and dryer against another, and elaborate recording equipment lines several shelves. A copying machine and other office equipment share the little space that remains with the plastic bottles of pesticides and lawn edger that are the more usual occupants of Florida garages.

A fresh, fit-looking elderly man switches on a machine above the piano, and, when it begins to emit a regular, drumlike beat, he sits down at the piano and starts to play. Next to him, standing, a middle-aged woman begins to sing, her voice low, torchy, swinging, her arms reaching out to encompass the listener in her song.

The man is Jesse Stone, 83; the woman, Evelyn McGee Stone, 63. When they moved a year ago from New York into this house in Winter Springs, musical history moved in, too.

Evelyn McGee Stone was for six years featured vocalist for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an integrated all-girl band that traveled all over the United States and Europe in the years during and after World War II; Billie Holiday once complained that young Evelyn McGee, on the same bill, received as much acclaim as the great blues singer herself.

Jesse Stone had a long career in jazz and swing before he wrote the song ''Shake, Rattle and Roll'' and dreamed up the bass figure that became the basic rhythm of rock 'n' roll; music mogul Ahmet Ertegun once told a writer that ''Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock 'n' roll sound than anybody else.''

Says Evelyn McGee Stone of her husband: ''You're talking to one of the giants.''

When a middle-aged or elderly couple move to Florida, retirement typically is foremost in their minds. Not so for the Stones. Jesse has started writing again, and Evelyn is looking for an agent; she wants to get together a little band to play the ballads and swing music she does best.

''We worked together all over Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan,'' she said of the couple's days as the Jesse Stone Duo. ''But rock 'n' roll was heavy on the scene then, and so we just stopped doing it. Now I'm ready to work again.''

Neither rock nor swing had been dreamed of when Jesse Stone entered the music business back in 1905 or thereabouts, at the age of 4. He was born in Atchison, Kan., where his extended family had a traveling act called Brown's Family Minstrels, and the little boy was pressed into service singing, dancing, doing tricks with dogs. Jesse got all his schooling on the road -- there were five schoolteachers in the family, including his mother -- and learned violin and piano playing, drumming and dancing from his parents.

Evntually his own immediate family left the troupe and went back to Atchison, where Stone later organized a band that played in saloons for a pass of the hat. At the University of Nebraska, he had a five-piece jazz band that kept getting bigger and bigger.

''At that particular time there weren't any big bands,'' Stone said. ''But I kept adding musicians. I ended up with two saxophones and then three. I had trombones, two trumpets, a sousaphone, a banjo player. Everybody could sing, dance, do jokes, even magic tricks.

''We had never heard of arranging,'' he said. ''I just wrote down what I wanted to hear.''

That band, among the first to play on radio, led to another and another, in Kansas City and then in Chicago. There is a picture of one band, the Cyclones, in 1934, at Chicago's El Morocco; Jesse Stone stands proudly out front, natty in a white double-breasted suit.

Then Duke Ellington came to Chicago and offered Jesse a job in New York, at the Cotton Club, where he fronted a three-member all-girl band called the Rhythm Debs, who sang, danced, did contortions and told jokes. By the time he wrote his first big hit, ''Idaho,'' in 1942, Jesse had toured the black circuit of theaters from Chicago to Miami, was writing songs for Mills Music and playing the Waldorf-Astoria every New Year's Eve.

It was about this time that Jesse Stone met the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, becoming their musical director for two years. The Sweethearts had formed in 1938 at Piney Woods Country Life School near Jackson, Miss., an all- girl band of 14- and 15-year-olds playing for dances and eventually traveling all over the South. In 1940 they played in Anderson, S.C., where a 19-year-old named Evelyn McGee sang with the band and left home to join them that same night.

''We were just coming out of the Depression, and I would be eating regularly,'' she said.

Girls in the band were black, Jewish, Irish, Mexican and Chinese, and they created a stir wherever they went -- sleeping in a bus because no hotel would have them, breaking records at major theaters in Baltimore, Chicago and Hollywood.

''At that time there weren't any girl bands that sounded like men,'' Jesse said. ''They all sounded like girls. But this band sounded like men.''